Support Board

We also want to explain the difference between direct order routing to the CME versus what TT offers.

The direct order routing is to the CME Convenience Gateway, which is very reliable, according to our infrastructure provider, and uses the FIX protocol. Even more reliable, than the market segment gateways. This is what we are told.

We first want to just talk about latency differences.

The convenience gateway, according to the CME has an additional 100 µs a higher latency as compared to the market segment gateways. We are referring to microseconds here, not milliseconds. This is a much more simplified and reliable way to interface with the CME. And according to our infrastructure provider, almost never has a problem.

Although there is a higher latency with the convenience gateway as compared to market segment gateways, the Sierra Chart order routing is so fast and so direct, that only makes sense, it is still going to be ahead of the time to be routing through a system like the CQG Web API or TT.

So basically we have a server in the Aurora data center and we will be adding another one, and these have a direct link to the CME infrastructure. Each server has two connections. An A and B. So if one fails there is another one. The CME also has a backup server.

So there are numerous levels of redundancy. Two servers. Two connections for each server. And two servers on the CME side. We can also add another ISP as well for further redundancy.

The order routing process is Sierra Chart, which we use now, which has what we call a service client, for the CME FIX protocol using iLink. All of this is a very simple and very straightforward. Really simple and really straightforward.

The risk management controls are also very simple and very reliable and very straightforward. The only thing that is an area of concern, would be automatic liquidation and we would not offer that right away and instead just simply if there is a margin violation, then only a reduction of positions is allowed and not new positions.

And then the clearing from can take the appropriate steps. Yes auto liquidation is something that we do have and can release at some point but we do not want to do this as a first step.

So what we are eliminating by removing TT, is the entire layer of complexity TT has. Instead it is just so simple and direct to the CME, through their highly reliable convenience gateway.

For example as we understand TT uses zookeeper:
https://zookeeper.apache.org/

There is nothing like this at all on the Sierra Chart side. All software is completely developed by us, and the order routing process is Sierra Chart itself using the DTC protocol server with multiple users connected in. So this is a proven and reliable platform all fully under our direct control and with very straightforward and simple architecture.

The fact that we have had zero downtime with the Denali feed, and the order routing would be be running on the very same infrastructure as the Denali feed, is example of the reliability of the direct routing.

And all of our testing so far with CME, we have not had any connectivity issues other than issues involving sequence numbers but all of those details have been worked out and resolved and we have consistently reliable connectivity in testing.

We always opt for simple and traditional.